"A member of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard, the chair of the Academica Sinica's advisory committee on the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Tu Weiming is currently interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for the emerging global community."

I'm indebted to Stephen Meng for introducing me to the work of Professor Tu. Here, for example, he writes about multiple possible modernities, the need for the US to stop teaching and start learning, the suggestion that liberty as an intrinsic value cannot generate a humane society without distributive justice, and much more.

In short, Professor Tu has identified two apparently contradictory diagnoses of the present state of human affairs: one the one hand, 'an optimistic assertion that fundamental ideological divides no longer exist' and, on the other, 'a cautionary note that cultural, especially religious, differences are the major sources of international conflict'.

This is precisely the dichotomy that Alain de Vulpian notes, though Vulpian is rather more inclined to see scenarios for the future of the world fitting into one or other of these two categories (peaceful and optimistic - violent and pessimistic). Tu, by contrast, suggests that different ways could easily develop in different regions (which seems hard to imagine in the face of current globalising tendencies, but who knows what Peak Oil may change in that respect?).

Anyway, I think they'd both agree that it might be a good idea for the individualistic West to stop deriding the collectivist East for their psycho-social backwardness, when the former got us into the present mess and the latter might help us out of it.